Izhar Cohen, Israel’s first Eurovision winner has released a unique “unofficial anthem” for this year’s Eurovision contest in Tel Aviv.
The reason for the song’s uniqueness is that it was a song composed by a computer.
A group of Israeli artists and musicians, assisted by programmers and entrepreneurs, worked with Oracle, a company that creates cloud-engineered systems, to create the ultimate Eurovision song.
The group fed 200 previous Eurovision entries into a machine-learning cloud system to create melodies and lines. Composer-songwriter Amir Sheinfeld then selected the most suitable parts to create a song that symbolize the Eurovision spirit.
Thus, Cohen’s new song “Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears” was born. The song’s musical director is Avshalom Ariel, who also produced Netta Barzilai’s 2018 Eurovision winning song “Toy” and her new hit “Bassa Sababa.”
Cohen’s new song pushes the limits of artificial intelligence and ignites the debate of whether a machine can possess the creativeness to write a song that can move us. This groundbreaking project could be the future of music.
No better singer could be chosen to bring to life this ambitious Eurovision exclusive project than Izhar Cohen, Israel’s Eurovision “king,” who won the contest in 1978 with his song “Abanibi,” and then represented Israel once more in 1985, when he finished in fifth place with his song “Oleh Oleh.”
The computer-generated song will be unveiled at the annual cloud conference of Oracle Israel, Oracle Cloud Day on May 14.
Cohen will be giving a free performance in Tel Aviv this week. The show begins on Friday at 2 p.m. in Dizengoff Center.